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  • Built for Someone Else

    Every few months, a startup announces that it is building for Bharat. The press release mentions tier 2 and tier 3 cities, the next billion users, and the untapped potential of non-English-speaking India. The deck has a slide with dots in Lucknow and Coimbatore and Bhubaneswar, and the intentions are often genuine. The product, when it eventually ships, works beautifully on an iPhone in Gurgaon.

    Bharat, for those unfamiliar with the term, is shorthand for the India that exists beyond the country’s major metros, the roughly 886 million people who were active internet users as of 2024, of whom 55% live in rural areas and 72% come from outside the country’s largest cities. This is the majority of India’s internet population, and it is growing faster than the urban slice, with nearly all of it, about 98%, accessing the internet primarily in languages other than English.

    Many of the products built for this population are designed by teams based in India’s major metros, whose assumptions about connectivity, language, and digital literacy do not always match those of the users they hope to reach.

     

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    That is the actual problem, and it sits upstream of every specific failure that gets catalogued in design postmortems. It is not primarily a translation problem, though bad translation is everywhere. It is not merely a localization problem either, though localization is frequently an afterthought. It is an imagination problem, and it is structural. The designers, product managers, and engineers building these apps were trained on frameworks developed in Silicon Valley, schooled in case studies from American and European companies, and are themselves fluent English speakers who live in Indian metros and use high-end smartphones on reliable 4G networks. They are not lazy or malicious, but simply unable to picture, with any precision, the person they are designing for, because nothing in their professional formation required them to.

    “There was one app where ‘Order Now’ was translated as ‘Abhi Aadesh Do,’” says Shruti Yadav, a product designer working on agri-tech tools in Madhya Pradesh. “Nobody talks like that. People thought it was a scam.” The word aadesh carries the register of an official command, the kind issued in a courtroom or a military briefing, grammatically correct but socially absurd, the equivalent of an app asking an American user to unironically “Procure Item Forthwith,” when ordering a mug online. The error is in the assumption that translation is a technical operation rather than a cultural one, an assumption that was never examined because the people who made it had never needed to.

     

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    It is an imagination problem, and it is structural.
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    This pattern repeats across every layer of product design. A search bar assumes literacy, a cart icon assumes prior experience with e-commerce, log-in code verification assumes a reliable network and a phone number that receives texts promptly, and email-based signup assumes that the user has and regularly checks an email account. These are choices that made sense for a particular kind of user in a particular context, imported wholesale into products targeting people for whom none of those conditions reliably hold.

    But occasionally a product gets it right. WhatsApp, which now has roughly 535 million users in India and functions as the country’s de facto communication infrastructure, did not achieve this by targeting India specifically. It achieved it by being designed around constraints that happened to match Indian realities, among them minimal data consumption, no email requirement, voice messaging as a first-class feature rather than an add-on, and an interface simple enough to work across generations. It fit the realities of Indian users without requiring those users to adapt to it.

    Most Bharat-first products have not managed the same.

    “You cannot rely on minimalist design,” says Ankit Mishra, co-founder of a regional news app focused on Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. “In English apps, fewer words and clean UI means credibility. But here, users want more context. They want to see faces, videos, and explanations. More importantly, they want to see people who look like them using the product.”

     

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    The idea quickly shifts from a tech issue to a trust issue. And trust in a first-time digital user looks very different from trust in someone who has been using apps for a decade. For the latter, a clean interface signals competence, and for the former, it can signal emptiness, a space that has not bothered to explain itself.

    The few companies that have genuinely cracked this have done so by treating the design constraints of non-metro India not as obstacles to work around but as the actual brief. Meesho, which now serves 213 million users with 87% of them from outside India’s eight largest cities, built its early product around the fact that its users were already conducting commerce through WhatsApp and Facebook groups, and that the trust required to complete a transaction came from personal relationships rather than polished interfaces. It did not try to teach its users to behave like e-commerce consumers. It met them where they already were. Kuku FM and ShareChat made similar calculations about content, with regional languages and voice-forward interfaces designed for intermittent connectivity and shared devices.

    Changing that starting assumption requires changing who is in the room when the assumptions are made. A product team staffed entirely by urban, English-educated designers working from a Bengaluru office is going to reproduce, even with the best intentions, the imaginative limits of that room. Field research and user interviews help, but there is a difference between visiting a user and being accountable to one, and most product teams in India are accountable upward, to investors and metrics, rather than outward, to the people the product is supposed to serve.

    The market for Bharat is already here. The harder task is designing as though the default user is the person holding the phone, not the person building the app.

  • Why Does the Future Always Look the Same?

    Think about the last time you imagined a city of the future. There were probably towers, glass and steel, screens embedded in surfaces, a sky interrupted by elevated transit, and neon bleeding into wet pavement at night. The scale was vertical. The palette was dark or cold or both. Almost certainly, it did not look like anywhere you actually live.

    One way to understand this convergence is through what the psychologist Joseph Henrich calls prestige-biased cultural learning, the human tendency to copy the behaviors and styles of people and institutions that appear successful rather than evaluating each choice from first principles. “At an individual level, this is efficient,” says Kavita M, a Delhi-based counsellor who studies cultural psychology. “At a cultural scale, it produces convergence.” Countries and industries imitate perceived leaders, and over time those borrowed choices begin to reinforce one another.

    “That is why financial districts around the world feature broadly similar towers, and why the visual language of economic power has become so standardized that you can often identify a building’s function before you can identify its country,” says Anurag T, a Delhi-based architect. Science fiction, in this reading, simply extrapolates that convergence to its imagined endpoint, mistaking a historical tendency for an inevitability.

     

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    Architecture has always been one of the clearest ways that power makes itself legible. The historian Thomas Metcalfe, writing about the British Raj, observed that the public buildings erected under colonial rule were charged with the explicit purpose of representing empire itself. The architecture was intended to make imperial authority visible and durable, turning the built environment into a statement of political power.

    Similar dynamics appeared elsewhere, where centralized authority used architecture to project legitimacy and permanence. Science fiction inherited this association almost without noticing. When a story needs to depict an all-powerful state or corporation, it reaches instinctively for visual sameness, rows of identical towers, anonymous crowds, reflective surfaces that express nothing beyond scale. The dystopia looks the way it does because audiences have learned, through long familiarity with how power presents itself, to read visual uniformity as control.

    That reading has a specific cinematic genealogy. In 1982, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner drew its visual grammar from Hong Kong’s neon-lit commercial districts, Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis, and the work of Syd Mead, the film’s credited visual futurist, who described his approach as layering new technology onto the accumulated wear of a city that could no longer afford to replace itself.

     

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    The film failed at the box office and became one of the most influential things ever put on screen. William Gibson, whose novel Neuromancer would help define the cyberpunk genre the following year, told The Paris Review in 2011 that he had avoided watching Blade Runner in theaters because he feared it would be better than what he had imagined. It was, he said, and even the first few minutes were better.

    In one important sense, Blade Runner did more than imagine a future. It gave other filmmakers a visual language they no longer had to build from scratch. By 1988, Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira had extended that language into anime, building Neo-Tokyo from neon and rubble and towers so tall they required a thousand floors to feel proportionate to the dread the story needed. Ghost in the Shell followed in 1995, its director Mamoru Oshii drawing on Hong Kong’s layered urban landscape to imagine a city where the past and the technological future occupied the same streets simultaneously. By the time The Matrix arrived in 1999, the grammar was so established that it functioned as shorthand, legible without explanation to audiences who had absorbed it across two decades of film without necessarily knowing they had.

    The images became the genre, and the genre became, for many people, the template for what the future was supposed to look like. Which is why what Hannah Beachler did for Black Panther in 2018 registers as more than a production design achievement.

     

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    Beachler spent eight months traveling across sub-Saharan Africa before she began designing Wakanda. She compiled a 515-page document she called the Wakanda Bible, detailing the architecture, topography, textiles, languages, and cultural logic of a fictional African nation that had never been colonized and had therefore developed entirely on its own terms. What she was practicing, deliberately and with considerable research behind it, was Afrofuturism, a movement that asks what African and diasporic cultures would have built, imagined, and become in the absence of the history that was actually imposed on them. The result was a future city that looked genuinely unlike most previously imagined ones, curved rather than angular, warm in its materials, drawing on rondavel rooflines, Zaha Hadid‘s fluid structures, and textile traditions from across the continent.

    Audiences responded with something that looked as much like relief as admiration. Beachler became the first African American to win the Academy Award for Best Production Design. The question worth asking is whether that response pointed to something the dominance of the cyberpunk aesthetic tends to obscure. The generic sci-fi city is not a reflection of universal human intuitions about what progress looks like. That is difficult to square with the diversity of ways in which different cultures have imagined technology, cities, and social life. Instead, it reflects which stories got made, by whom, with whose resources, and whose existing imagery they drew from.

    It became the default because those particular films were seen everywhere and their influence compounded, not because they captured something true about where all of us are headed. When we imagine the future, we imagine it from somewhere. That somewhere shapes everything, from the scale of the buildings and the logic of the streets to whether density reads as vitality or danger, whether ornament signals care or excess, and whether the future feels like it belongs to everyone. We have simply mistaken one visual language for the future itself.

  • The Aesthetics of Seriousness

    Walk into a bank in New York, a venture capital office in Bengaluru, an Apple Store in Shanghai, or a luxury skincare boutique in Paris and you will notice something curious. Many of the world’s most powerful institutions now look uncannily alike.

    The colors are restrained, the logos are simple, there is space between objects, and almost nothing appears accidental. That convergence matters for more than aesthetic reasons. As AI tools increasingly generate the websites, interfaces, and brand identities we encounter every day, they are also learning what authority is supposed to look like, and reproducing those assumptions at scale.

    It would be easy to read this as convergence on good design. It is more interesting to ask how one particular visual language came to feel like the obvious choice in places with very different histories and aesthetic traditions.

    The story does not begin with any single person or manifesto. In the early twentieth century, European architects and designers began arguing, with real conviction, that ornament was wasteful, that simplicity was honest, and that form should follow function. That argument took institutional shape in the Bauhaus in Germany, in the clean geometry of Swiss typography, and in the postwar corporate design of American companies that needed their identities to travel across borders without losing legibility. As these ideas moved into advertising, technology, publishing, and retail, they gradually stopped looking like ideas at all.

     

    Swiss Style began in Switzerland during the 1940s and 1950s. / in.pinterest.com

     

    A style had become so widespread that it no longer appeared to be a style.

    Once that happened, everything else acquired a kind of unearned baggage. A dense page came to seem confusing rather than rich, decoration began to imply excess rather than care, and bright colors read as unserious. Ornate typography suggested nostalgia or kitsch. None of those associations are inherent to the things themselves. They accumulated through a particular history, in particular places, and then traveled further than the history did.

    You can feel the distance between traditions most clearly when you look at visual cultures that developed along different lines.

    In the truck art of Pakistan and northern India, surfaces invite prolonged attention, layered with floral borders, Urdu calligraphy, mirrored panels, and painted birds. The gopuram towers of Madurai’s Meenakshi Amman Temple rise above the city with thousands of sculpted figures across their facades, encouraging repeated viewing rather than instant comprehension. Across much of South Asia, a wedding invitation that arrives without layering, gilding, and detail often reads not as elegant but as indifferent, as though the occasion did not merit the effort. In these traditions, visual abundance is often not a sign of disorder. It can communicate care, celebration, craftsmanship, or social importance.

     

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    The point is not that one tradition is more sophisticated than another. It is that what reads as sophisticated depends on what you have been trained to read, and most of us absorb those trainings so early and so completely that they feel like perception rather than preference.

    Brands have understood this instinct, even without naming it. During the 2010s, some of the most recognizable names in luxury fashion abandoned their distinctive heritage lettering for nearly identical clean sans serif wordmarks. Saint Laurent dropped the founder’s curved script in 2012, Balenciaga followed in 2017, Burberry in 2018, with Balmain and Celine close behind. The redesigns were defended as cleaner and more contemporary, better suited to digital screens. What attracted less commentary was that genuinely different houses, each with a distinct history and country of origin, had come to look surprisingly similar. One industry publication called it “blanding.” A few years later, Burberry reinstated its equestrian knight and Saint Laurent brought back the Cassandre monogram first designed in 1961. The reversal suggested that distinctiveness still had value.

    The forces pushing in the opposite direction, however, have only grown stronger.

    AI design tools can now generate interfaces, logos, landing pages, and brand systems in seconds. Their outputs often converge on familiar patterns, generous white space, restrained typography, muted palettes, and similar button styles. One frequently cited example comes from Tailwind CSS, whose creator chose indigo as the framework’s default accent color because it looked polished and professional. That decision influenced countless developers and templates and has since become emblematic of how quickly design defaults can spread across the web.

     

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    Researchers and designers have increasingly warned that these systems can reinforce existing conventions rather than expand them. When models are trained on large collections of contemporary websites and branding, they are likely to reproduce the patterns that already dominate those datasets. The risk is a feedback loop in which familiar aesthetics become even more dominant.

    Consumers respond to these signals in ways that tend to run beneath conscious awareness. Researchers studying what psychologists call processing fluency, the ease with which the brain handles visual information, have found that simpler and more legible presentations can produce a sense of cognitive ease that people then associate with trustworthiness and quality. We do not only read design. We tend to infer credibility from it before engaging with the content itself.

    Those impressions carry cultural assumptions that frequently go unexamined, and they are now being reinforced by tools capable of producing design at enormous scale.

    Minimalism did not become dominant because everyone agreed it was the most beautiful way to design. It became dominant because it came to look like the absence of style, the visual equivalent of common sense. The difference now is that those assumptions are no longer transmitted only by schools, brands, or institutions. They are increasingly embedded in the software that helps design the next generation of interfaces, logos, and websites, making one cultural preference feel ever more universal.

  • Made You Look

    Open your front camera. Pick a filter. You still look like yourself, just smoother, sharper, lighter. You didn’t ask for an upgrade, but the algorithm gave you one anyway.

    Face filters seem harmless, right up until you examine what they’re doing, and who they’re built for. Behind each digital ‘enhancement’ is a machine learning model trained on data that largely skews to a Western model. When these models are applied to South Asian faces, they automatically lighten skin, narrow noses and straighten jaws.

    Platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat rely on facial recognition tools developed primarily in the West. In one study from MIT Media Lab, facial analysis algorithms had an error rate of just 0.8% for light-skinned men, but up to 34.7% for dark-skinned women. That’s not just about identification. It also signals who the system sees clearly and who it reshapes.

    The effect isn’t always obvious. Many Instagram filters don’t announce themselves because they’re baked into the default camera settings. A light blur here, some auto-slimming there; you post the selfie because the camera automatically makes you look good. 

     

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    In one study from MIT Media Lab, facial analysis algorithms had an error rate of just 0.8% for light-skinned men, but up to 34.7% for dark-skinned women.
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    Globally, over 1.5 billion people use augmented reality filters every day. In India, with its 200+ million Instagram users, the numbers aren’t broken out — but scroll for five minutes and you’ll see it. A filter-fed aesthetic is slowly becoming the norm. Eventually, unfiltered faces start to feel almost unnatural.

    India already had a complicated relationship with beauty. Caste, class, and colourism have long defined desirability. What filters do is scale those ideas. Preferences become presets. Bias becomes baseline. 

     

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    You could argue this isn’t new. After all, fairness creams and nose jobs have been telling us what to fix for decades. But tech makes it frictionless. You don’t have to choose change anymore. The camera does it for you.

    When Snapchat launched its ‘beauty’ lens in 2020, users across Asia pointed out how it lightened skin and Europeanized features. Tiktok installed on South Korean and Japanese phones automatically whitened users’ skin, gave them smaller faces and plumped up their lips. Some have pointed out that their Japanese TikTok, when used with a Japanese SIM, wouldn’t let them record anything without a beauty filter. The app’s “Bold Glamour” filter uses AI so precise it doesn’t glitch when you move your face or dance around the room. It works so well that it doesn’t feel like a filter any more, it feels like a suggestion.

     

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    When Snapchat launched its ‘beauty’ lens in 2020, users across Asia pointed out how it lightened skin and Europeanized features.
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    India’s creator economy is responding. Filter makers are designing AR effects that lean into regional features, brown skin tones, and desi humour. But platform discovery still rewards what’s already working. And what’s working is what fits global defaults.

    If beauty is becoming a tech product, we have to ask: who’s writing the code? Who trained the model? How many Indian faces were in the dataset?

    The face in the mirror is yours. The one on the screen might be the platform’s version of you. The real question is, will we keep editing ourselves until we match it?

  • Who Gets to Keep History?

    In a flat in Kalyan, a satellite town about 45 kilometers northeast of Mumbai, a retired bank manager named Vijay Surwade keeps B.R. Ambedkar’s dentures in a shirt box. Next to them are gold-rimmed spectacle frames, a broken violin string, and a gold-plated Movado watch. Surwade spent five decades, evenings mostly, building what is now considered one of the world’s largest personal archives dedicated to the man who wrote India’s constitution, the country’s first law minister, and its most prominent Dalit rights leader. Ambedkar studied at Columbia University and the London School of Economics. His legacy reached institutions. Surwade spent decades ensuring that the objects surrounding it did too.

    “This is our history,” Surwade has said. “No one else will preserve it.”

    That sentence, simple and almost resigned, is also the operating principle behind a growing network of independent archivists across India who are collecting what formal institutions have long decided isn’t worth the shelf space. They are not librarians, mostly. They are filmmakers, lawyers, activists, and people who simply found themselves in possession of things that felt too important to throw away.

     

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    Formal archives everywhere tend to reflect the priorities of whoever funded them. In India, that has typically meant state papers, elite correspondence, published texts, the records of movements that won, and the biographies of people who were already famous. What falls through is everything else, the pamphlets distributed outside a factory gate, the court affidavit filed by someone who came out as gay when doing so carried a criminal risk, or the feminist protest poster that was never meant to last beyond the march.

    The Queer Archive for Memory, Reflection and Activism, known as QAMRA and based at the National Law School of India University in Bangalore, began almost by accident. In 2013, India’s Supreme Court reinstated a colonial-era law, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, that criminalized same-sex relations, overturning a landmark 2009 judgment that had struck it down. When the court described queer Indians as a “minuscule minority,” filmmaker T. Jayashree, who had been documenting queer life and activism since 2000, recognized a problem. There was evidence of an entire movement but no permanent place for it to live.

     

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    Formal archives everywhere tend to reflect the priorities of whoever funded them.
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    By 2017, that footage, over a thousand hours of it, along with court documents, activist papers, diaries, manuscripts, and five-language newspaper clippings from Sangama, a Bangalore-based sexuality-rights organization, became the founding collection of QAMRA. The archive holds the case files and affidavits from the legal challenge to Section 377, records of Pride marches and community consultations, and the private journals of individuals who shared their stories at considerable personal risk. India finally decriminalized homosexuality in 2018, in a second Supreme Court ruling. The archive predates that victory and documents the decades of organizing that made it possible. Without QAMRA, much of that record would exist only in people’s memory, or not at all.

    Across the country, similar efforts are taking shape under different conditions and with different materials. Zubaan Books, a feminist publishing house in Delhi founded in 2003, runs an archival project called Poster Women, a collection of feminist protest posters from the 1970s onward, materials that were produced to be carried in a march or pasted on a wall, not preserved behind glass. Their newer project, Our Stories, Our Words, documents the histories of women from communities that have been historically excluded from the official record of India’s women’s movement, actively involving researchers and writers from those communities in telling their own stories.

    The logic behind all of these projects is roughly the same, though the materials differ. Objects and documents that were never intended to survive often reveal the most about how people actually lived, what they feared, what they organized around, and what they celebrated. A protest poster printed for a single march, a court affidavit filed in the course of an ordinary legal proceeding, or a shirt box full of photographs saved by one person over decades can preserve details that rarely make it into official records.

     

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    What these archives preserve is not just content but texture, the everyday experiences that formal histories often condense or overlook altogether.

    The importance of these efforts becomes especially visible in the preservation of Dalit history. Dalits, who sit at the bottom of the Hindu caste hierarchy and have historically been designated “untouchable,” have faced discrimination that has structural parallels to the experience of Black Americans, a comparison that Ambedkar himself drew when he visited the United States in the 1940s and met with W.E.B. Du Bois. The Dalit Panthers movement of the 1970s, which modeled itself explicitly on the Black Panther Party, produced pamphlets and broadsides that are now scattered across private homes, surviving because individuals held onto them rather than because any institution thought to.

    Surwade is one of many. Scholars estimate there could be thousands of informal Dalit archivists across India, most self-trained and working without institutional support, preserving material that academic collections have largely ignored. Their work expands the historical record with documents and objects that might otherwise have been lost, making it easier to trace the lives, movements, and ideas that official collections have not always captured.

    The most interesting thing about these projects is not what they save, but the assumptions they challenge about what saving means. Most of them operate without climate-controlled rooms, without metadata consultants, without the infrastructure that the word ‘archive’ usually implies. While Surwade uses shirt boxes and concertina files, QAMRA began in a filmmaker’s studio, and Poster Women lives online. The barrier to entry is low, which is part of the point. Taken together, they challenge the assumption that preserving history is the exclusive domain of large institutions.

     

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    The most interesting thing about these projects is not what they save, but the assumptions they challenge about what saving means.
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    Many of these collections also resist the standard archival logic of the single authoritative curator. QAMRA’s model involves community contributions, with participants deciding what gets prioritized. Zubaan’s projects engage the communities being documented as co-creators rather than subjects. The line between who keeps the archive and who is archived becomes blurry, deliberately so.

    There is also a shift in what counts as a primary source. A WhatsApp message thread documenting a grassroots campaign, a voice memo, or a Dalit wedding card from the 1970s featuring Ambedkar’s photograph can all become archival material. Together, they suggest that history is not preserved only in official records but also in the everyday documents people create for one another.

    History, the official kind, is always also a selection. Someone decided what to keep and what to let go, which movements mattered and which were marginal, whose testimony counted as documentation and whose was just hearsay. Independent archives are a long argument against those decisions.

    They are also, in a more immediate sense, insurance. When Surwade started collecting, he did it because he believed no one else would. He was right. Fifty years later, the shirt boxes and concertina files in his Kalyan flat have become a destination for scholars from around the world.

    He thought someone should do it. Then he thought that someone should be him.

  • The Luxury of Live Experiences

    There is a problem with everything being available. After a while, nothing feels necessary. Theatre has always resisted that logic. It asks for a particular kind of attention that no other medium quite produces. It is not the passivity of a streaming platform, and it is not the distracted watching of a phone in hand. It is the knowledge that what is happening in front of you is happening only once, that the actor on stage is aware of you as you are aware of them, and that the experience will not be available for replay.

    For decades, this quality was treated as theatre’s limitation. It is increasingly looking like its advantage.

    Streaming platforms have trained us to treat culture as inventory, something to be browsed, sampled, abandoned, and returned to later, or never. The algorithm optimizes for the next thing, which means it undermines the experience of being fully inside the current one. You cannot pause a play, you cannot watch it at 1.5 speed, and you cannot look at your phone without missing something that will not recur. Constraints that once seemed inconvenient have begun to feel, for many people, like relief.

     

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    This is goes beyond being nostalgia for analog experience and often turns into a desire for an encounter that makes a genuine claim on your presence, one that treats your attention as something worth having rather than something to be captured and monetized. Theatre does this by necessity. Liveness is not an added feature of the form. It is the form.

    The appetite for that kind of experience is showing up well beyond the stage. Live Nation reported 151 million attendees across its events in 2024. Book festivals, running clubs, supper clubs, and Saturday morning food markets are flourishing in the same cultural moment. They offer something a screen cannot replicate, the experience of being physically present with other people inside something unfolding in real time.

    A stadium concert may tolerate divided attention. A theatre, at least most theatre worth attending, does not.

    In India, the signs of this shift are visible in ways that would have been harder to predict a decade ago. Prithvi Theatre in Mumbai has long been one of the country’s most reliable cultural barometers, staging more than 640 performances each year while sustaining average attendance of around 80 percent. Its audiences have always been loyal. What feels newer is the sense that people who never thought of themselves as theatregoers are beginning to find their way into these spaces.

     

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    In India, the signs of this shift are visible in ways that would have been harder to predict a decade ago.
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    The Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre, which opened in Mumbai in 2023, welcomed more than one million visitors in its first year, hosted over 700 performances, and staged India’s first Broadway musical. Whatever one makes of private cultural patronage at that scale, the centre has signaled that live performance remains worth investing in and capable of attracting audiences well beyond traditional theatre circles.

    Smaller venues across Mumbai, Delhi, and Bengaluru appear to be experiencing a similar shift in interest, even if comprehensive attendance data remains difficult to come by. The people arriving are not always seasoned theatre enthusiasts. Many are looking first for an evening out, the social ritual of leaving home and sharing an experience with strangers, and discovering that theatre offers something their regular media diet does not. As Ishita, a Mumbai-based writer, recently put it, “If I wanted to half-watch something, I would watch it on Netflix. But I want to go out and get away from a screen. So I watch a play instead. We’re watching one nearly every week now.”

    The remark contains more than it first appears to. It is not merely a preference between two art forms. It is a description of what going out has come to mean. Choosing, together, to be in a room and pay attention to something has become an experience in itself. The togetherness matters. The commitment matters. So does the knowledge that this particular evening, with this audience and these performers, will never happen in exactly the same way again.

     

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    Whether this develops into a lasting shift remains uncertain. Infrastructure takes time, and audiences have to become habits. The informal circuit that sustained Indian theatre through leaner decades is not automatically equipped to scale, and scaling without losing what made those spaces distinctive is a genuine challenge. There is also the question of whether new funding encourages experimentation or rewards safer forms of cultural programming.

    Those are important questions. But they are the questions of a living art form rather than one in retreat.

    The interesting thing about liveness is that it cannot be optimized. You can improve the production, the acoustics, and the sightlines. You cannot eliminate the possibility that something unexpected will happen, whether it is a missed cue, an inspired improvisation, or a moment of connection that exists only for the people in the room that night.

    That unpredictability is not a flaw to be engineered away. For audiences who spend much of their lives inside systems designed for convenience, personalization, and endless replay, it may be the very thing worth leaving the house for.

  • The Other Side of the Field: Inside the New Stadium

    The 2026 FIFA World Cup is unfolding across sixteen stadiums in three countries. None of those venues was built for the tournament. Once the final whistle blows, they will return to hosting league matches, concerts, and other live events, a reminder that the modern stadium has become something much larger than a home for sport.

    The idea that stadiums exist primarily to host sports is becoming harder to defend. The buildings still bear the names of teams, and the teams still play inside them. But the financial logic driving billions of dollars in stadium construction and renovation is no longer organized around the ninety minutes on the pitch or the three hours on the field. It is organized around everything that happens before, after, and between games.

    A June 2026 report from Addleshaw Goddard, a law firm that advises on major venue developments across Europe and North America, found that more than 300 stadium construction and renovation projects began globally in 2025. It also reported that European clubs that own their stadiums derive 76 percent of their commercial revenue from non-matchday activity, according to Estates Gazette’s coverage of the research. Hotels, conference centers, restaurants, concerts, corporate events, and weddings have all become part of the business model. Sport increasingly serves as the anchor tenant of a much larger enterprise.

     

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    This shift has been building for years, but several trends have accelerated it. Television revenue, once considered the industry’s most dependable income stream, has become less predictable as streaming fragments audiences and media rights negotiations grow more complex. Construction costs have climbed sharply, making it difficult to justify venues that sit empty for most of the year. The result is a stadium designed to stay busy, one that functions as an entertainment destination rather than a building that opens only on game day.

    The question worth asking is why this model has become so compelling at a moment when almost everything a stadium once monopolized, watching a match, listening to music, or following a team, can be experienced from a screen at home. The answer may lie in the one thing digital life still struggles to reproduce, the feeling of being there.

    Tottenham Hotspur Stadium offers one illustration. Built with a retractable grass pitch and a synthetic surface beneath it, the venue can switch from Premier League football to NFL games in roughly a day and has also become one of London’s busiest concert venues. SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, one of this summer’s World Cup hosts, sits at the center of the 300 acre Hollywood Park development, alongside apartments, retail, hospitality, and entertainment spaces. The stadium itself hosts only a limited number of NFL games each year, but it is active far more often than that. Beyoncé performed five nights there in May.

    A similar pattern is visible in India. Coldplay’s two January 2025 concerts at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad drew more than 220,000 attendees and generated an estimated ₹641 crore in economic impact for the city, underscoring the growing role of large venues as year-round entertainment destinations.

     

    “
    The question worth asking is why this model has become so compelling at a moment when almost everything a stadium once monopolized… can be experienced from a screen at home.
    ”

     

    The concert business helps explain why. Pollstar reported that average gross revenue from stadium concerts reached $7.11 million per show in 2025, up 19 percent from the previous year, while average ticket prices rose 18 percent. Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour became the highest grossing tour on record. Those figures illustrate why developers continue investing in venues that can accommodate music, festivals, and other large gatherings alongside sport.

    Demand for live experiences appears to be growing as well. Eventbrite’s 2026 Social Study, surveying adults aged 18 to 35 in the United States and Britain, found that 79 percent planned to attend more live events than they had the previous year. People are paying for more than the match or the concert itself. They are paying to occupy the same physical space as thousands of strangers reacting in real time, an experience that remains difficult to replicate online.

    The World Cup itself fits neatly into that logic. FIFA did not require a fleet of newly built arenas. It relied on existing venues that could be upgraded to tournament standards and continue generating revenue long after the competition ends. Renovations across the host stadiums are expected to leave behind infrastructure that supports concerts, conventions, and other events for years to come, extending the commercial life of each building well beyond football.

     

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    The model is not without tradeoffs. Ticket prices have risen steadily across many major leagues, making attendance less accessible for some supporters. Economists have long questioned whether public subsidies for stadium projects deliver returns that justify their cost, and local businesses can lose foot traffic when visitors spend their time and money inside integrated entertainment districts rather than in surrounding neighborhoods.

    There is also a cultural cost that is harder to quantify. For generations, stadiums brought together people who might otherwise have had little in common beyond allegiance to a team. They stood in the same queues, sat in the same sections, and reacted together. Premium clubs, private lounges, and hospitality suites do not eliminate that atmosphere, but they redistribute it across different tiers of access.

    Researchers and designers have long argued that densely packed supporter sections contribute meaningfully to the character of a match. Borussia Dortmund’s Yellow Wall, one of football’s most famous standing sections, is often cited as evidence that architecture shapes atmosphere as much as the game itself. Clubs understand this. Even as hospitality expands, many preserve vocal supporter areas because they remain essential to the experience the venue is selling.

    What is emerging in city after city is a different kind of civic space, one built to host concerts, conferences, festivals, restaurants, and football in equal measure, and to remain active throughout the year. In an increasingly digital world, developers are making a remarkably consistent bet that people will continue to place value on gathering in person, and will keep paying for places that make those gatherings possible.

  • Running the Extra Mile

    Do you remember running as a child? 

    Running for the pleasure of the run, arms windmilling, legs a-blur as you careened down the road, running hell for leather, running and collapsing into giggles, running without direction, just running. When was the last time you ran like that?

    We’re all grown up now of course. We have full time jobs, families to caretake, homes to maintain. If we have time to run (or exercise), it is clocked and measured and logged into apps. Ours is an era of utilitarianism in which all acts must be overtly purposeful, their value measurable in some way, else they are deemed a waste of time, dispensable.  

    Let us for instance, take the app Strava. Strava is an app for active people – “Strava athletes upload everything from walks around the block to Tour de France stage wins. If you’re out there going for it, you’re one of us,” says the website. 

     

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    In every way, this is admirable. If there is an app that can propel a largely sedentary population to get off their behinds and move, it can only be a good thing. Similarly, My Fitness Pal is an excellent food tracker, logging meals to help us eat better by tracking calories and macros.  Both are amongst the most downloaded free fitness apps available around the world. 

    The bonus? Most apps (including the two mentioned above) offer community resources to build camaraderie and competition. “I love the connection, I love the encouragement,” says Tamiko G, a My Fitness Pal member. Users log the details of their day, their cycle runs, their meal plans, their Pilates sessions. Thus, they measure the minutiae of their lives against their online fitness community, who cheer them on to get even faster, even thinner, even better.  

    Research on runners inside virtual training clubs has found that people who receive encouragement and recognition for their logged activities tend to run more consistently, than those who don’t. Over time, runners in the same online groups take on similar training habits, syncing pace, distance and frequency with their community. People who engage with fitness-app communities, whether through encouragement from friends and family or friendly competition with strangers, report higher activity levels than those exercising alone. 

     

    “
    If there is an app that can propel a largely sedentary population to get off their behinds and move, it can only be a good thing.
    ”

     

    The other side of the coin? There’s a particular kind of guilt that didn’t exist a generation ago: the guilt of going for a run and not recording it. “If it’s not on Strava, it didn’t happen” has become something of a running joke among athletes. But when fitness becomes an act that is constantly performed for others, how does that affect our identity and our behaviour?

    As with traditional social media, we begin to chase the thrill of the like, growing ever more virtuous with every post. Segments and personal bests became a kind of currency. We begin to shuttle between the demands of social media and a sense of inadequacy in the face of thousands of people whose lives seem more productive than our own.

    After all, scrolling past an athlete’s effortless-looking long run distorts what a regular workout looks like; most of us aren’t really trying to win the Mumbai Marathon, we’re just trying to stay in shape. 

    However bright a gloss you paint on it, leaderboards and badges can tap into our worst primal instincts: pride in winning, envy at being outdone, vanity at having outdone another. These mechanics aren’t accidental; they’re the same psychological levers that make any social platform sticky.

     

     

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    Missed goals or broken streaks don’t just disappoint people, they can trigger guilt, shame, anxiety, or a compulsion to ‘make up’ for the lapse later, a pattern that sits uncomfortably close to disordered relationships with food and exercise. Notably, much of this distress gets framed by users themselves as a personal failing rather than a predictable consequence of how these systems are designed to keep people engaged.

    Consequently, an October 2025 study in the British Journal of Health Psychology found that users highlighted “numerous negative behavioral and psychological consequences of these apps, including feelings of shame, disappointment, and demotivation, and subsequent disengagement with apps and health behaviors.” 

     

    “
    However bright a gloss you paint on it, leaderboards and badges can tap into our worst primal instincts: pride in winning, envy at being outdone, vanity at having outdone another.
    ”

     

    The same social features that can breed comparison and guilt are, for many people, the reason they exercise at all. The honest picture is more like a double-edged sword: the visibility that pulls someone off the couch is the same visibility that can make them feel inadequate once they’re moving.

    What seems to matter most is who that visibility is shared with. People whose feeds consist mostly of peers, friends, and genuinely supportive communities use others’ fitness metrics as fuel. Those who follow professional athletes or influencers report feeling a constant sense of inadequacy tugging at their thoughts; enough sometimes, to stop them from exercising at all. 

    Fitness apps didn’t invent comparison, pride, or the desire to be seen. They simply built a stage for instincts that were already there. Whether that stage helps you move more or makes you feel worse seems to depend less on the app itself, and more on what you choose to watch while you’re on it.

  • The Golden Girls

    Scene 1: Aunty wobbles slowly down a staircase, her leg encased in a thick bandage, wires protruding from her nose. Her foot misses a step, but her son steadies her.

    Scene 2: Aunty is in a gym, wearing a loose salwar kameez and fuchsia pink sneakers. She looks fragile, dwarfed by the thick support belt she has girdled round her waist. Suddenly she bends down, et voila! Aunty has just deadlifted 80 kgs (approximately 175 pounds) with ease. 

    This isn’t the latest Avengers film. This is a reel from the Instagram account maaormannu, managed by the trainer Manish Singh Shakya (via @becomingmannu), featuring his 57-year-old mother Javitri Shakya. What makes Ms Shakya’s journey even more extraordinary is that she has battled cancer, and is missing a chunk of flesh from her leg.

    Scene 1: The camera, all a-blur, focuses on an aunty in a pea-green salwar kameez. Her hair is streaked with white, and she is breathing heavily. Around her, young men with ropy muscled arms, stand around and chat with each other.

    Scene 2: Aunty stretches to get rid of the kinks in her back, then bends down. She has just trapbar deadlifted 110 kgs (pounds) with perfect form.

    These aren’t scenes from the Justice League film. This is a reel from the Instagram account Weightliftermummy, featuring 71-year old Roshni Devi Sangwan, who has been featured everywhere from the South China Morning Post to the BBC. As in Ms Shakya’s case, Ms Sangwan is trained by her son, Ajay Sangwan.

     

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    Across India, a slew of older Indian women are picking up heavy pieces of metal in the gym, and skewering stereotypes in the process. Urged on by worried children, many of whom are fitness trainers themselves, these ladies are reversing osteoporosis, calming their cholesterol, and reducing their diabetes. The biggest flex, it turns out, is no longer just your Hyrox trophy. It’s your mother hip thrusting 100 kgs. 

    In a testosterone-steeped country, this is more than just a trend. It gestures to a much larger societal shift. 

    But first, let us examine some numbers. India’s commercial fitness sector is valued at ₹16,200 crore — roughly US$1.94 billion — with some 46,500 facilities and 12.3 million members. By 2030, that figure is expected to nearly double, to ₹37,700 crore, with 23.3 million Indians possessing a gym membership. 

    And yet, according to a 2024 report by the Ministry of Statistics and Program Implementation, only 3.9 percent of Indian women under 29 exercise daily. For men in the same age bracket, the figure is 14.8 percent. For every woman exercising in India, nearly four men are doing the same. And it goes without saying that the participation rate drops even further still as women age into motherhood and grandmotherhood. 

     

    “
    Women are buttressed by the restrictive language of respectability. Is it entirely respectable, patriarchy asks, for a woman to go into a male-dominated space such as a gymnasium, and lift heavy pieces of metal, perhaps with a male trainer?
    ”

     

    Consider what the average Indian woman’s day looks like. She wakes early to cook and pack lunchboxes, to shunt children off to school and husband off to work. A full day of office work later, she returns home to the third shift of the day; cooking, doing the dishes, supervising homework, the endless administration of her household. Studies on time use in India consistently show that women spend three to ten times more hours on unpaid domestic work than men do. 

    Then there is the question of space. Fitness — running, cycling, strength training at the gym — is largely predicated on striding into public spaces. But such spaces are oft seen as the arenas of men; women instead, are buttressed into their homes by the restrictive language of respectability. Is it entirely respectable, patriarchy asks, for a woman to go into a male-dominated space such as a gymnasium, and lift heavy pieces of metal, perhaps with a male trainer? And when it comes to older women, that fear swells, folded into the larger worry of injuries to aging bones and joints.

    Gendered constraints aside, there is also the peculiar problem of plenty. Middle-income families are now glutted with a vast choice of carbohydrate and fat-rich food in restaurants and stores. Traditional Indian food skews towards starch anyway, and without the balance of fitness, older Indian women are amongst the highest at-risk demographic for bone and heart disease. 

     

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    Luckily change is coming, slowly but surely.

    In cities like Bengaluru, Chennai, Mumbai, and Hyderabad, a new crop of women-only fitness spaces has begun to emerge. Pink Fitness, India’s largest all-women fitness chain, is staffed entirely by women: trainers, dietitians, physiotherapists, even housekeepers. Commercial gymnasiums sometimes offer women-only zones. 

    And simultaneously, India’s ‘Silver Economy’ is starting to spike a massive infusion of wealth into age-related fitness services. There are a handful of indications already. For one, even a cursory glance at most newly-developed senior living spaces will reveal that they are endowed with superbly-equipped gyms. Secondly, fitness trainers such as Bhavna Harchandrai, certified in senior citizen fitness, are now hosting training sessions for anyone above 60. An overwhelming majority of students are women. An ecosystem is slowly bricking itself around the aunty.

    Social media is reflecting this change too. A new wave of fitfluencers with names like @young67fit, @fitwithdadi and @barbellaunty are acting as megaphones for a different gym demographic — older, self-assured baddies, entirely comfortable squatting in salwar kameez. 

     

    “
    India’s ‘Silver Economy’ is starting to spike a massive infusion of wealth into age-related fitness services.
    ”

     

    This revolution is mirrored around the world. In the United States, women like Joan MacDonald — who began lifting at 70, thanks to her fitness-trainer daughter — and Virginia Maccoll — a three-time Ninja Warrior competitor in her seventies — have built vast online (and offline) followings. Catherine Kuehn broke multiple world powerlifting records in her nineties. Meanwhile, in Taiwan, a ‘super-aged’ society with more than 20% of its population aging into their 60s, more and more senior women are finding their way into gyms, proving that their strongest years are ahead of them.

    And so something is stirring. And in the churn of social media and aspirational culture, the image of what an older woman’s body can do is being renegotiated in real time. The sons and daughters of women who never exercised are now fitness trainers, and they are urging their mothers to the gym. Perhaps this is the way that change comes then: not through institutions first, but through families. Not through public policy, initially, but slowly, slowly, through the persuasions of a concerned child. 

     

  • The New Souvenir Is Hiding in the Grocery Store

    For a long time, the modern souvenir followed a reliable formula. A fridge magnet, a keychain, or a miniature monument reduced to something that could fit in a carry-on and sit quietly on a shelf back home, marking the fact that you had been somewhere else.

    That formula is losing ground, and what is replacing it is stranger and, in some ways, more interesting.

    Travelers are coming home from Japan with FamilyMart socks, from Paris with drugstore skincare, and from supermarkets in countries whose language they barely speak carrying bags full of snacks, spices, and pantry staples they have no recipe for yet. These are objects that were never designed to be souvenirs. They were designed to be used.

    Davneet S. noticed it on a recent trip to Paris. “I came back with skincare,” he says, “and not the fancy kind, the drugstore kind. At the store I kept meeting other travelers doing the same thing, buying for themselves and for people back home. It’s a thing now, apparently.”

     

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    He is not alone in noticing. Ankita S., who traveled to South Korea last year, found that what people asked her to bring back had shifted noticeably from previous trips. Sheet masks, specific ramen flavors, and convenience store basics, items so inexpensive that the requests surprised her at first. “That stuff is so cheap,” she says, “but it was also interesting.” Her sister wanted something entirely different, a Japanese kitchen knife with the kind of reputation that has earned a devoted following among serious cooks. The price was very different. The logic was the same.

    Part of what has made this shift visible is the internet. A generation ago, most visitors had little idea what people in another country actually bought at the supermarket or pharmacy. Today, those recommendations circulate constantly through travel forums, social media, and videos that linger over the shelves of ordinary grocery stores. Convenience stores, neighborhood pharmacies, and supermarkets have become destinations in their own right, and the products on their shelves have joined museums and restaurants as things worth seeking out.

    Japan offers one of the clearest illustrations of where this can lead. FamilyMart, one of the country’s largest convenience store chains, launched its Convenience Wear clothing line in 2021 with Tokyo designer Hiromichi Ochiai of Facetasm. The line’s striped crew socks, priced at 390 yen, or about $2.50, quickly became a bestseller and have since sold more than 20 million pairs. Their appeal lies almost entirely in the fact that they were never intended for tourists at all.

     

    “
    These are objects that were never designed to be souvenirs. They were designed to be used.
    ”

     

    The regional KitKat arrived at a similar destination by a different route. Its name, pronounced in Japanese, sounds close to “kitto katsu”, or “you will surely win,” leading students to exchange the chocolate before entrance exams long before Nestlé embraced the association. The company eventually built campaigns around the custom and expanded its range of regional flavors, tying varieties to places such as Kyoto and Okinawa. In the process, the chocolate bar became something else as well, an edible reminder of travel that could be carried home and shared.

    Which raises the question of why any of this matters, why the object we carry back from a trip carries meaning at all.

    The literary scholar Susan Stewart argued in On Longing that souvenirs stand in for experiences that cannot themselves be transported. You cannot bring home the atmosphere of a Tokyo convenience store or an afternoon spent wandering Parisian pharmacies, so you bring back something that points toward those experiences instead. What has changed is not the underlying impulse but the objects people trust to do that work.

    Anthropologist Simi K. argues that souvenirs do social work beyond simple remembrance. “Without the object, the trip remains an experience in the traveler’s head,” she says. “The souvenir gives it a physical form that can be passed to someone else.”

     

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    A fridge magnet points to a place. A tube of moisturizer or a pair of socks points to how people actually live there.

    The French sociologist Marcel Mauss would likely have recognized the social logic beneath the trend. In The Gift, published in 1925, he argued that gifts help create and maintain relationships through acts of exchange. A souvenir is not only a reminder for the traveler. It is also a way of including someone else in the journey, of returning with something that says they were remembered.

    India has long had its own version of this practice, even if it has rarely been described in those terms. People return from Pune with Shrewsbury biscuits, from Kerala with banana chips, or from holidays with sweets divided among relatives and colleagues. The gesture often matters more than the object itself. A tin of biscuits is meant to be opened and shared around a table rather than displayed on a shelf.

    That is what the new souvenir seems to be doing everywhere. The memory stays active through use rather than display. Increasingly, the objects people choose to bring home are not the ones made to represent a place. They are the ones that already belonged there.